Atlanta Mayoral Race Poised to Move to a Recount

Image

Keisha Lance Bottoms at an election night watch party in Atlanta early Wednesday. Ms. Bottoms declared victory after a close mayoral race on Tuesday, but her opponent, Mary Norwood, said she would request a recount.CreditCreditJohn Bazemore/Associated Press

ATLANTA — For the second time in eight years, the leadership of the South’s most influential city is likely to be settled after a recount.

Fewer than 800 votes separated Atlanta’s two candidates for mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms and Mary Norwood, after officials tallied more than 92,000 ballots that were cast in a runoff election on Tuesday, according to preliminary returns. The margin was narrow enough that Ms. Norwood, seeking to become Atlanta’s first white mayor in more than 40 years, said she would ask for a recount once provisional and absentee ballots were counted this week.

But Ms. Bottoms and her allies declared victory on Wednesday.

“This has been a very, very, very long campaign, but as we look ahead toward the future, I look forward to engaging with each of you, making sure that our city continues to move forward,” said Ms. Bottoms, who is a member of the City Council from Southwest Atlanta. “And for those who did not support me, I look forward to working with you as well because this is still a city for all of us.”

After a fractious campaign in which race was a persistent undercurrent, it was perhaps unsurprising that the contest would endure a last dash of turmoil. But the call for a recount gave Wednesday’s aftermath a surreal edge: In 2009, Ms. Norwood sought a recount when she trailed in the mayoral election.

Ms. Norwood ultimately lost that race, by 714 votes, to Kasim Reed. On Wednesday, Ms. Bottoms’s lead was 759 votes — or about 0.8 percent of the vote, within the range in which a candidate is allowed to request a recount.

Image

Ms. Norwood at her election party on Tuesday.CreditDavid Goldman/Associated Press

“I’ve done this before,” said Ms. Norwood, an at-large city councilor. “The next few days are going to be all hands on deck and all analysis done, so we’re going to know that every single vote that has been cast is exactly reported out the way that it should be.”

The 2009 contest in Atlanta, which, in the last eight years, has seen as many mayoral race recounts as it has postseason victories by the Atlanta Braves, suggests that another tabulation is unlikely to help Ms. Norwood significantly. The recount in 2009 changed the outcome by a single vote.

If Ms. Bottoms is eventually declared the winner and takes office next month, she would extend decades of black political power in Atlanta, which has not had a white mayor since 1974. Although a recent poll suggested that Ms. Bottoms was trailing, her campaign appeared to benefit from the support of figures like Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and civil rights leader, and an aggressive effort to depict Ms. Norwood as exceedingly conservative.

While the mayoral race in Atlanta is formally nonpartisan, Ms. Bottoms made her political allegiance plain: She was a Democrat whose beliefs aligned with those of a growing city known as something of a Southern bastion for liberal politics. Over the weekend, two of the nation’s most influential Democrats, Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, visited Atlanta to campaign for Ms. Bottoms.

Democrats also relentlessly targeted Ms. Norwood, an independent, as “Mary the Republican” and said that her ties to Republicans, as well as her refusal to endorse the Democratic candidate who lost a bitterly contested special election for Congress in June, made her too conservative for Atlanta.

Yet there were relatively few conspicuous policy differences between Ms. Bottoms and Ms. Norwood, who picked up the endorsements of some prominent local Democrats, as they competed to lead Atlanta, a city of about 473,000 residents. Like other anchors of major metropolitan areas, Atlanta is struggling with severe income inequality, the perils of gentrification and gridlock for its commuters.

There is also the haze of a federal corruption inquiry at City Hall that undercut Mr. Reed’s final year. (He has not been charged with any crimes, nor has he been implicated by any of the evidence that has been made public.) And, as with most high-profile campaigns in municipal politics, there were plenty of moments when the contest seemed like little more than a proxy for settling scores and cultivating grudges.

“It’s become more of a name-calling: ‘She’s a Republican!’ ‘This is the one who has been involved in criminal activity!’ ” said Robert A. Holmes, a former state legislator and a biographer of Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first black mayor. “You haven’t really heard a lot about the issues because there’s very little difference between the two.”

Ms. Bottoms and Ms. Norwood both tried to portray themselves as candidates who would serve all of Atlanta’s 242 neighborhoods, from the wealthy enclaves near the Governor’s Mansion to the area surrounding the federal penitentiary that once housed Al Capone. Indeed, Mr. Holmes said he believed that many voters saw the election as a referendum on Mr. Reed’s tenure, which included the construction of a football stadium for the Atlanta Falcons that cost about $1.5 billion. (On Wednesday, Mr. Reed, who endorsed Ms. Bottoms, repeatedly described her as his successor.)

But the matter of whether Atlanta would elect its first white mayor since the Nixon era was an inescapable subject. Most Atlanta residents are black, and the city is a national hub of black education, entertainment and politics.

Image

Early returns being broadcast on a television at a party for Ms. Norwood. The final unofficial returns had the candidates separated by fewer than 800 votes.CreditDavid Goldman/Associated Press

Yet the mathematics of black influence have shifted as Atlanta has evolved.

“Blacks don’t have a supermajority anymore and, because of that, can’t just rest on the laurels of getting 90 percent of the black vote and being able to win,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University who studies African-American politics. “Black voters are still going to be really pivotal in deciding elections, but they’re not the only group here.”

Especially in the campaign’s closing days, race often seemed to be at the forefront. During a televised debate on Sunday, Ms. Norwood had to answer for her use of what Ms. Bottoms described as “racially coded language,” including the terms “thugs” and “felons,” when she was secretly recorded talking about her 2009 defeat. Ms. Norwood, who said the footage had been “spliced and doctored” after her appearance before the Buckhead Young Republicans, argued that she had been promoting the need for integrity in elections.

Ms. Norwood also made her own appeals to the city’s black voters, including a radio advertisement starring Shirley Franklin, a black woman who preceded Mr. Reed as mayor and backed Ms. Norwood in this year’s election.

“Some people say that endorsement may hurt my legacy because I’ve endorsed a white woman over a black woman,” Ms. Franklin said in a segment where she cited her efforts to advance civil rights and mentioned her work for Mr. Jackson.

“This election is about character, transparency and integrity, not race,” she said.

Both candidates mounted major efforts to lure voters to the ballot box for an Election Day that was all but preordained to have a light turnout. Before the polls closed Tuesday night, pollsters and strategists watching the Atlanta contest said their surveys suggested that the city’s attitudes toward race would prove as decisive as get-out-the-vote efforts.

“It’s a story of racial polarization,” Professor Gillespie said. “It’s also a story of turnout.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: With 92,000 Votes for Atlanta Mayor, Margin Is Under 800. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe